Elias Khoury - Gate of the Sun

But first tell me, what is the story of that spirit woman and that man who drowned in the circles of the red sun?

That happened at the beginning, but even so, it comes just at the end of the story.

Nahilah explained it to you, it was a simple misunderstanding. You thought she was a spirit, and she thought you were a prophet. You ran away, she knelt down, and Nahilah laughed and laughed.

You told me you named the tree Laila. You used to sleep by day inside the trunk of the Roman olive tree, and when you were with Nahilah you’d talk to her about Laila, and see the jealousy in her eyes.

It was the beginning of the fifties, and Yunes was making one of his trips to Bab al-Shams. That day, he hid inside the Roman olive tree on the outskirts of Tarshiha. When the sun began to set, he came out of his tree and saw something he’d never forget.

He said he’d never in his life forget that woman.

“She was wearing a long black dress, and had covered her hair with a black headscarf. She saw me and came toward me. I shrank back against the tree. I was wearing my long, olive-green coat and carrying my rifle like a stick. The woman was approaching me. She was far away, the sun was in my eyes so I couldn’t see her silhouette clearly. I saw a black phantom emerging from among the red rays of the sun and coming toward me. Then, when she was two hundred meters away, she stopped in her tracks as though she were rooted to the ground, knelt down, rubbed her brow with dust, and raised her face toward me. She put her hands together and said something in an Arabic that I wasn’t familiar with. Then she rose, stumbling over her long dress. I took advantage of the moment to hide inside the trunk of the tree, slipping inside it with my heart beating like a drum. I stayed inside the trunk until night had covered everything. There was something strange in her eyes. I thought she was a spirit even though I don’t believe in spirits; but I was afraid, very afraid.”

When Yunes told Nahilah how he’d stood close to his tree, wrapped in the red rays of the sun, and how the spirit woman had appeared to him at a distance and how she was going to carry his mind off like in the stories, Nahilah laughed for a long time.

“A spirit woman! The Yemenis are everywhere. That must have been a Yemeni Jewess.”

Nahilah told Yunes about the sobs they’d heard coming from the moshav the Yemenis had built over al-Birwa and about the mysterious rumors of children dying and disappearing. She said the Yemeni Jewesses would go out into the fields and lament like Arab women and that she’d started to fear for her children. “If the children of the Jews are disappearing, what will happen to ours?”

“That spirit woman was no spirit,” said Nahilah. “She was a poor woman like us who must have lost one of her children. So when she saw you, she probably thought you were a vision of the prophet Elias.”

Nahilah laughed at you and called you Elias, saying that with your beard you’d started to look like a Jewish prophet.

You can’t forget the scene — a black ray emerging from the red rays of the sun, a woman kneeling on the ground and crying out in a voice to rend the heavens. You thought of her as “Rachel the spirit,” and on your way to see Nahilah, you’d enter the Roman tree and invoke the Yemeni woman. You told Nahilah that you were a Yemeni, too. “We come from Yemen. Our tribe migrated from there when the Ma’rib dam collapsed; the dam collapsed and drowned Yemen, and we fled. I’m Yemeni and my sweetheart’s Yemeni, I have to look for her.”

Nahilah would be a little jealous, but then she’d take you into the space at the back of the cave that she christened “the bathroom,” where she’d make you take off you clothes and would bathe you. You’d stand naked and she’d be wearing her long black dress, which would get soaked and cling to her body, kindling your desire, and you’d grab her with the soap still all over you, and she’d slip out of your grasp and say, “Go to your Yemeni woman. I don’t care.”

I told you about the Yemeni woman to wish you sweet dreams.

I, too, need to sleep so that tomorrow I can try to convince Zainab not to leave the hospital. I don’t know anything about Zainab. I’ve been living with her here for more than six months, and I know nothing. She’s been here since the beginning. During these months everything has changed, as you know: Dr. Amjad comes only rarely, I’ve become head nurse and acting director of the hospital, the nurses have disappeared one after another, the hospital’s been converted into a warehouse for medicine, but Zainab’s still here, immovable. She limps a little, her shoulders droop, she has a short neck and small eyes. She moves like a ghost and takes care of everything. The cook left so Zainab has become the cook. Nabil went abroad so Zainab took over responsibility for the operating room. The Syrian guard disappeared so Zainab’s become the doorkeeper. Zainab is the hospital. I don’t care anymore. I spend most of my time with you, convinced that it’s no use struggling for the hospital’s survival. I had many discussions with Dr. Amjad, and I’ve tried with Mme. Wedad al-Najjar, the Palestine Red Crescent official in Lebanon, but it’s no use.

No one wants this hospital anymore, as though we’d all agreed to announce the death of Shatila.

The camp is besieged from the outside and demolished on the inside, and they won’t let us rebuild it. The whole of Lebanon was rebuilt after the war, except here; this testimony to butchery must be removed from our memories, wiped out just as our villages were wiped out and our souls lacerated.

I’ve lost hope. I said, “If they don’t want it, too bad,” and I built an imaginary wall around your room and won’t let anyone come near you. At first Amjad tried to make me believe that the decision to move you couldn’t be revoked, then I forced him to back down. I thought I’d scored a victory, but I discovered he simply didn’t care. No one cares. They said, “He’ll eventually get tired of it, and if he doesn’t get tired of it, the old man will die anyway,” and no one expected my treatment method would be so successful. Amjad used to think your death would be a matter of days, and Zainab said you wouldn’t see the end of your first month, but here we are, past the sixth and into the seventh. We have to hang on to the end of the seventh month. If we get through the seventh, we’ll definitely get to the ninth, and the ninth is where salvation lies. But they don’t know. They’ve shut us in here and left us to rot. If only they knew. I’m certain that no one has the slightest notion of what’s going on in this room, here with the world, the women, the words.

I told you Zainab’s become everything, meaning nothing. When someone becomes everything it means they’ve lost their particularity. Zainab’s like that: I wasn’t aware of her presence beyond the fact that she was present. I didn’t ask her for anything. Then two days ago she came to me and said she’d decided to stop working. It never crossed my mind that Zainab could stop working: She exists because she works.

She came to your room and said she wanted to speak to me.

“What, Zainab?”

“No, not in front of him,” she said.

“Speak up, Zainab. There are no strangers here.”

“Please, Dr. Khalil. I’m afraid to talk in front of him. Please come with me to the office.”

I followed her to Dr. Amjad’s office, which would have become my office if people took things seriously around here. Zainab went out and returned after a few minutes with a pot of coffee. She poured us both a cup and said that the children wanted her to stop working.

“You’re married and have children, Zainab?”

“Of course, Doctor.”